What happened to my ranking

[WallerD]

Hi trying to rank for "liverpool wedding photographer" as my main keyword.

my profile is mainly wedding blogs and photography blog comments, a few "featured weddings" from wedding blogs , directory links and I have also a few guest post blogs.

Goy myself all excited in December by getting to 4th position and then followed that up by around 35 links in one week.

So expecting my ranking to stabilise or even go up I watched my site slowly sink to a current position of 7th,

over January, even as the new links kicked in.

a weird thing happened in this period as the following sites where I had left one comment on a blog post ended up giving me links from nearly all the other posts they had written:

http://www.richardbernabe.com/blog/2012/12/04/iceland-bound-again/

http://blog.leica-camera.com/2014/12/03/andrew-kaufman-documenting-the-disappearing-street-art-of-wynwood/

http://jnack.com/blog/2015/01/04/when-will-wearable-cameras-be-a-thing/

webmaster tools is indicating I have 374 links from the leica site, 174 links from the richardbernabe site and 77 from the njack one. They are all different blog posts!

I have disavowed all three domains.

Can anyone explain what has caused this multiplication of links from these particular sites?

Also could my link spree have caused a penalty?

Best wishes.

David.

http://jnack.com/blog/2015/01/04/when-will-wearable-cameras-be-a-thing/

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi David,

The proliferation of links throughout the sites you left comments on is probably just a function of some weird trackback settings on their part - not a whole lot to be done besides disavow the links, which you've already done, although you might also try to delete the link from the original comment and see if that helps.

Your site sinking from 4th to 7th is not an indication of a penalty - if you'd been penalized, you wouldn't be anywhere near the first page (although I do think you are describing link building behavior that puts you at risk for a penalty - more on that in a minute). Instead, what I suspect happened is that the sudden influx of low-quality links has diluted your page's authority. Since a lower percentage of the total links pointing to the page are high quality, you have gone from sending the signal "great links, with some not-so-great ones too" to sending the signal "LOTS of not-so-great links, a few good ones" which sends a lower quality signal to Google.

Your question has a couple of big link building red flags in it, and I think it's likely you're at risk for a manual link penalty or a Penguin smackdown. Blog comments and directory links are classic examples of low-quality/spammy link sources. You have recently seen how blog comment links can result in a deluge of link spam to your site. Basically, anywhere that you can put a link on a site that you don't own, without a human person approving and curating the link, is going to be a link source that, at best, isn't valuable; at worst, it could actively work against you. I know that it's tempting to go out and grab these easy-to-get links, and sometimes it seems like it could be OK if the site is topically related to yours, but these are tactics that have been heavily abused by spammers and are beyond useless in modern SEO.

Instead, focus on getting higher-quality editorial links to your content. It takes a lot more work but is a much lower-risk strategy in the long term. These links have the added bonus of potentially being a source of converting referral traffic to your site as well. Here are some resources to get you started:

• https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
• https://moz.com/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building
• https://moz.com/blog/targeted-link-building-in-2016
• https://moz.com/blog/case-study-how-we-gained-more-than-100-links-for-a-travel-website-via-content-marketing

Good luck!